I found some really interesting ideas in the playtest version of Caoimhe Ora Snow’s current Kickstarter project: The Queen’s Cavaliers RPG. I backed the project so that I could download the playtest document and get a look at the mechanics.

The Queen’s Cavaliers is a role-playing game that evokes stylish and heroic swashbuckling tales like Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (but with a “clockpunk” twist that frankly is of secondary interest to me). I’ve tried, as both a player and a GM, to create swashbuckling action in my D&D games in the past — swinging from chandeliers, harrowing fights in a ship’s rigging, duels atop runaway carriages! — tried and failed. I don’t know if it’s the rules or the culture, but D&D favours a stand-and-deliver style of combat that would put Errol Flynn to sleep.

A quote from The Queen’s Cavaliers’ Kickstarter page:

TQC’s combat system is flexible and designed to be entertaining, with more options than simply doing damage from round to round. Want to swing on a chandelier to gain advantage over your foes, or recite an epic poem to build style points? These are all valid and effective strategies in TQC.

So I wanted to get a look under the hood to see how the game achieves its claims.

In TQC, a successful combat roll results not in hit-point damage but in a number of Success Points. You then spend those points according to the skill that you were using. For example, the Feint skill (each cross is a Success Point):

I like the idea that you can achieve anything from gaining the upper hand to disarming your foe, or a combination of things, with a single roll. Combat seems focused on making creative, cinematic manoeuvres and getting your opponent to yield. Style Points can be spent to add dice to future rolls, and players are encouraged to narrate how the extra die allows them to succeed with style and flair, just like those unshakable Musketeers.

Overall, the resolution system is pretty detailed compared to most indie games — I might put it on par with D&D — but it’s very well organized, self-consistent and easy to understand. Best of all, I can really see myself swinging from the chandeliers!

2014 is turning out to be a really, really good year for new games. Not only is Vincent Baker actively and publicly developing the next Apocalypse World game, and so far it looks brilliant; but Ron Edwards (of Sorcerer fame) is developing and publishing a new RPG! The latter, called Circle of Hands, Kickstartered in March and is due to be published by the end of the year. From now until the end of the summer, Ron is running an open playtest of the working draft. What a great opportunity, not just to get a sneak preview of a favourite designer’s latest game, but also to participate in game development with him! I grabbed the playtest document and assembled a few friends to play it with me.

Circle of Hands is a gritty story-now RPG set in a fictional iron-age land that culturally and technologically resembles Northen Europe around 1000CE. Not castles but walled towns. Not kings but chieftains. Not swords but spears. There are no non-human races, but there are some fantastic monsters. The combat mechanics aim to be fast, simple and brutal while bringing a measure of realism never before seen in a fantasy RPG. And there is magic, oh is there magic. Gone is the false choice of muscles or brains; if you want to wield magic, you’d better be strong enough. There are no skinny bookish spellcasters in this harsh land. Wizards mutter spells through gritted teeth, between spear thrust and shield bash.

Mitch, Peter and Christian stepped up to try out the game with me (David also volunteered, but due to interference by Real Life never actually made it to a session). They really threw themselves into the true spirit of playtesting. Although I offered to teach them the rules at the table, they all read the playtest doc ahead of the first session. They gamely tried the different character options, and worked to test all the mechanics in play. And best of all, they gave good post-game discussion and feedback. All of our comments were enthusiastically received by Ron on the Adept Press forum, and lead to some very interesting conversations. Our names will be in the published game. We played three sessions in total, and it was a great experience.

What’s the game like? As promised, fast and brutal. A scenario is meant to be started and finished in one night, which we usually achieved without having to rush. The game has an interesting scenario-generation mechanic for the GM, which doesn’t take long at all and results in some very charged situations. It’s a story-now game, so the GM isn’t meant to plan out what happens. He creates the initial conditions (location, problem, some NPCs), and then plays to find out what happens. Game play includes a mandatory social roll for every PC/major-NPC interaction, which strongly influences how things proceed. This is great, because it makes it impossible for the GM to plan what will happen in a scenario, and leads to some very interesting unexpected situations.

Besides the above, the game stands out for two reasons: the combat mechanics and the magic rules.

Combat mechanics

Whenever you attack OR are attacked, you enter a “clash” with your opponent. You each roll attack and defense at once, and either one of you can injure the other. You also get to decide how far you bias your action towards attack or defense. And then there’s the Advantage die; one and only one character in each clash gets an extra die based on the immediate tactical situation. There are no rounds, and what we would traditionally call the initiative order is very dynamic. Whenever you attack or fight back, you go to the end of the initiative order. If you get attacked a lot, you might never get to initiate any actions, but you could still be doing a lot of damage. Any time, you can spend a point of Brawn to skip to the front of the line. But don’t be a spendthrift: Brawn is also your damage modifier, your hit points AND your spell points! In practice, all this meant for some very exciting combat scenes full of rapid reversals of fortune. The mechanics are just complex enough to demand quick and strategic thinking.

Magic rules

All PCs use magic. Wizard PCs have access to all of the spells; yes, all of them, right from the start. Non-wizards select just a few spells for their repertoires. There are two types of magic: White and Black. As you might expect, White is all about healing and purity, and Black is demons and necromancy. But don’t make the mistake of calling them Good and Evil; they’re both terrible. White magic run amok will purify your village right out of existence, erasing it as surely as a horde of undead will. All NPC wizards are devoted to one source of magic or the other, and the war between White and Black magic is the scourge of the setting world. The PCs are unique in that they alone have sworn to use both kinds of magic in balance. Spellcasting expends your Brawn attribute (as mentioned above), and using too much magic of one colour has permanent consequences.

Circle of Hands has a few other unique spins on the way we role-play. I won’t try to get into them all now. Overall, we really enjoyed the game, and as GM I was forced to practice some new techniques. We and other playtesters did manage to find a couple of leaks in the rules. Ron is currently re-writing and reformulating several parts of the game. I look forward to playing it again soon; and to eventually receiving the finished product.